logoalt Hacker News

topgrain2today at 1:58 PM5 repliesview on HN

Fuck, I spent all these years developing a thoughtful writing style that leaned toward clarity for the reader, even if it meant extra work to achieve precision, or adding affordances like “excessive” hyphenation, and now I guess have to learn to write worse.


Replies

napsterbrtoday at 2:02 PM

There is a world of difference between well-written human text and sloppy walls of AI-generated text. There's nothing wrong in using hyphenations or emdashes -- I use them myself! That's not the point of my comment.

show 2 replies
tshaddoxtoday at 2:48 PM

I think it’s exceedingly unlikely for a good-faith reader to mistake good-faith human writing for AI writing.

Even if you use em dashes and a few phrases that have become associated with AI writing, there’s still an unmistakeable sense of how much effort was put into the writing.

But I suppose there might be naive readers who don’t know how to spot this effort and would false positive on em dashes or supposed AI phrases.

ambicaptertoday at 3:15 PM

Oh no, how will you write clearly without hyphens?

davidmurdochtoday at 2:42 PM

Don't change. The homogenous way LLMs write is just tiresome and boring, like if every movie stared Ryan Reynolds - an actor famous for having no range. Ryan Reynolds is enjoyable to watch on occasion, but I don't want everything I watch to be Ryan Reynolds.

swiftcodertoday at 2:30 PM

It does feel a bit like the LLMs have commoditised correct writing form, and all the plebs are all up in arms about it...

show 1 reply